Sunday, June 16, 2013

2013 Star Trek books: my shopping list and comments

So I just search through Amazon looking to see if I missed anything and what I have to look forward to. There's a lot of reprints and repackages from IDW missing here, because I'm beyond tired of IDW's constant recycling.

January

Star Trek The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation Vol. 2 by Scott Tipton, David Tipton and J.K. Woodward (Jan 11, 2013)
Star Trek: The Original Series: Allegiance in Exile by David R. George III (Jan 29, 2013)

Star Trek: The Next Generation: on Board the U.S.S. Enterprise by Michael Okuda (Mar 14, 2013)
Star Trek: The Original Series: The Children of Kings by David Stern (Mar 16, 2013)
Star Trek: The Visual Dictionary by DK Publishing (Mar 18, 2013)
Star Trek and History (Wiley Pop Culture and History Series) by Nancy Reagin (Mar 18, 2013)
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow (Mar 25, 2013)
Star Trek: The Original Series: The Weight of Worlds by Greg Cox (Mar 26, 2013)

Star Trek: Countdown to Darkness by Mike Johnson and David Messina (May 15, 2013)
Star Trek Cross-Stitch: Explore Strange New Worlds of Crafting by John Lohman (May 28, 2013)
Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity by William Leisner (May 28, 2013)

June

Star Trek FAQ 2.0: Everything Left to Know About The Next Generation, the Movies, and Beyond (Unofficial and Unauthorized... by Mark Clark (Jun 18, 2013)
Star Trek: Enterprise: Rise of the Federation: A Choice of Futures by Christopher L. Bennett (Jun 25, 2013)

Looking at the year, there's not a lot of interesting unauthorized stuff. There's not a lot of variety in the Pocket novels. Most of what's left is gimmicky stuff for casual fans: quotes, crafts, etc. The most productive company, when you include what I left out of this list, is probably IDW, and I'm at the point where I don't care if they lose or give up the licence to do Trek comics because I'm so completely uninterested in what they're doing. Retelling original series episodes with the new crew, with random changes that half the time don't have much to do with the changes to the timeline, doesn't feel like a viable long term plan, But IDW is happy enough with that, and with "official" prequel and sequel comics for the movies that get contradicted almost instantly. And don't get me started on the fans who think those comics are canon.

As for the novels, while they're often as good as ever on a novel-by-novel basis, I don't like having half a year dedicated to standalone original series novels and half a year devoted to the ever-more tangled and depressing post-TV continuity. I can't help but find it all frustrating compared to a few years back, when we had more than just a novel per month (plus an ebook or two a year) and when we had multiple discrete series with different styles and sensibilities. I also liked it a lot more when editors, writers, and fans hung out in places like TrekBBS, and we had more of a sense of who was running the book program and where they were heading.

Meanwhile, how has the success of the JJ Abrams movies affected the book line? Not much. There's no novels based on the new continuity except novelizations and a handful of YA Starfleet Academy novels.

We've had two big stories about the books this year. One was that they're a big success story, with lots of new publishers being licenced to produce new books -- but those are resulting in things like the TNG quote book. Meanwhile, we also heard, if less officially, that Abrams thought he was getting full control of the Trek franchise, not realizing it's split between CBS and Paramount, that he wanted to stop TOS stuff from being produced, etc etc. While I would have liked a world in which there are new continuity novels and a new TV series, I don't want it coming from Abrams and his crew, who do not fundamentally understand Star Trek. Let them play with Star Wars and let's find someone who wants Star Trek to be less stupid and action-packed than Transformers movies. What's Ira Steven Behr doing these days, I wonder...

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